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Dienstag, 9. September 2014

MARF Productions - Monthly Challenge (September)

Yay, it' September and it is my turn again to write a blogpost about the challenge and talk about my lessons learned.This month's topic is: a ballpoint pen drawing inspired by Marco Mazzoni Marco Mazzonis tumblr.
More links to his websites and articles about him are in my previous post.

I have to admit, that I have no clue yet what I want to do. But it is probably going to be a little piece with not that much details, due to a lot of university-stuff going on.
Nevertheless I am looking forward to it. I remember using ballpoint pens for drawings a few years ago and it was a lot of fun.

Step1.

After I scraped my plans several times I finally decided to realise an idea I was having in mind for some time now. It is about a boy who can talk to pumpkins, a so called pumpkin whisperer. There is a little story to it that I am hopefully going to share soon, when I am done with university duties and have more time.

The steps I take are pretty much the same every time. At the beginning I made some pencil scribbles. In my head I had imagined the boy and the pumpkin drawn from the side without any perspective. While drawing I realised, that a low angle perspective would be way more interesting and give the piece a nice and mighty atmosphere. This first sketches were as big as the palm of my hand.

Step2.

When I had found the composition I wanted to go for, I made another sketch about three times as big, trying to figure out how to accomplish the difficult perspective. The left hand and arm turned out to be especially difficult, considering that the hand is a lot nearer to the viewer than the body.

I did not work with a fotoreference in this one. I did however research hoodie folds, mens faces from a low angle perspective and pumpkins. I also worked a lot with my mirror, especially concerning the hand problem.

Step3.

After that I transferred the sketch to the final paper. It is a light beige coloured card in A4. I did not have my lighttable at hand so I did a completely new sketch, getting the last changes in.
As you can see, I did a very detailed pencil drawing. This part is up to yourself, it is more of a personal preference or the
way you feel that day. Because ballpoint pen is permanent and I have not
worked with it in a long time I felt rather insecure about the actual drawing process, so I wanted to take no chances.

Later I discovered that working on pencil lines with ballpoint pen is rather annoying, because the graphite kind of gets stuck in the ball and no ink is released at all. Which was pretty annoying because I had to draw constantly on a seperate paper to get the colour flowing again. So, either use a lighttable and do not sketch with pencil at all, or just sketch very lightly and use the art eraser to take all the spare graphite away.

Step4.

Ink it. (Be careful, ballpointpen tends to make unwanted dots and strokes, so clean your pen on an other piece of paper every now and then.)

Step5.

Scan it, photoshop it and upload it to the MARF Challenge folder.
Because my scanner tends to kill anything that looks like a papertexture, I added a free papertexture from the internet to give it more of a natural feeling. Also I adjusted the moon and the stars a little bit.

And that was it. I hope you enjoyed this months challenge, I certainly did.
Have a wonderful next month with the new challenge topic:
Fashionillustration with collage elements like feathers, petals, different papers, and so on.
<3